A New Jersey democrat is using her political muscle to force citizens across the state to register their bicycles with the Division of Motor Vehicles. The ridiculous maneuver would help the state offset its $10 billion budget deficit by enforcing a $10 per license plate fee and fines up to $100 for those, including children, caught riding unregistered bikes.

Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker (D-Essex) said balancing the state’s budget isn’t her motivation for the outlandish proposal; it’s protecting senior citizens from getting run over by kids on bikes.

Affixing license plates to every bicycle in the state would help these vulnerable senior citizens identify and rattle off the license plate numbers from the kids’ bikes to the police, ensuring the rascals are brought to justice, says Tucker.

Tucker’s proposal has been met with opposition by a diverse group of interests including bicyclists, environmentalists, business owners and even her own colleagues in the State House.

“That’s an outrage, for sure,” said Paige Hiemier, vice-president of the New Jersey Bike & Walk Coalition. “Basically, it’s outrageous for a number of reasons, and most of them are: Who is the legislation aimed at? Who’s going to administer it? How are they going to pay for it? Who’s going to stop the bicyclists and check their registration?”

New York State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz (D-Brooklyn) is on a roll, and we’re only 11 days in to the New Year. Earlier today we reported that he wants to install mandatory breathalyzers in New Yorkers’ automobiles by 2015, and now we get wind that he’s proposing a tax on kids’ rice cakes and video entertainment.

Ortiz has noticed that kids are getting kind of fat, so he’s slapping a wee little tax—one quarter of one percent—on sales of all the foods listed as sweets or snacks in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, plus a tax on sale and rentals of video games and movies and game controllers. (A faint silver lining: Reading this bill taught me what DVD stands for. Digital Versatile Disk, apparently. Who knew?) That money goes to an “Childhood Obesity Prevention Program Fund.” But the tax fails to distinguish between good and bad snack, and good and bad video games. So in the name of obesity prevention, education games will get hit, as will these USDA-listed snacks …

Here’s another blooper from Ortiz’ proposed ‘anti-obesity’ tax: Kids and adults intent on purchasing Nintendo’s Wii ‘Fit’ games would be penalized with a sin tax. According to People magazine, First Lady Michelle Obama encourages her two girls to engage in Wii’s virtual physical fitness games on a regular basis.

Got some advice for Ortiz before his next attempt to legislate the behaviors and eating habits of New Yorkers both young and old? Contact his office.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that the St. Paul school district will make all public schools “sweet-free zones” by the end of the school year. Opponents of the plan say “there is little proof such policies work” and that “it’s a school’s role to teach — not force — students to eat healthy.”

The school district’s unproven and experimental anti-obesity crusade is being fueled by “a series of state and federal grants, the largest of which will end this school year.”

Agree or disagree with St. Paul Public Schools’ crusade to rid all “sweet, sticky, fat-laden [and] salty treats” from kids’ lunchboxes and cafeteria trays?

Contact Superintendent Valeria S. Silva if you think parents, not bureaucrats, should determine what’s best for their own children to consume in school cafeterias:

Michelle Malkin just released her “Big Nannies of the Year” list and Reason.tv recently held its annual red carpet ‘awards gala.’ Find out who made the cut and let us know if a notorious nanny state nincompoop has been overlooked.

Kids have become obsessed with dieting to the point of nearly starving themselves to death, courtesy of America's crusade against childhood obesity.

A new report published in the Journal of American Academy of Pediatrics links a 119-percent rise in hospitalizations for childhood eating disorders over the past decade to anti-obesity crusaders that are making kids too paranoid to eat anymore.

Dr. Tracie Pasold, director of the eating disorder clinic for Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, Ark., said she can confirm the report’s findings that anorexia and bulimia are taking a rising toll on America’s school children ranging from grades K-12: Her clinic sees 8 new patients a week on average.

“It’s becoming an issue for them eight years old, nine years old, ten years old,” Pasold said. “They’ve not been consuming enough calories to compensate for what they’re [sic] body needs based on energy levels and that sort of thing.”

Marketers are cashing-in on parents' paranoia about their kids becoming obese.

In her expert opinion, Pasold believes America’s growing army of anti-obesity crusaders, from the White House to the Principal’s Office, are responsible for sparking eating disorders in school children. Kids are taking it upon themselves to excessively diet, avoid certain foods that have been demonized, and over-exercise because they’ve heard that’s what they need to do to be ‘healthy.’

And, what kid wouldn’t want to do whatever it takes to avoid bringing home a letter from school saying he or she is obese? Obesity has been declared a “disease” of “epidemic” proportions by bureaucrats, doctors, and the media, making kids go to extremes to avoid the devastating stigma it now carries.

Read the tagline. It's not just a catchy slogan; it's how bureaucrats like Greg Mertzig think of themselves.

A nanny state bureaucrat in Superior, Wisc. is equating the lure of Happy Meal toys to candy cigarettes, claiming both types of novelty items encourage “lethal habits” that need to be controlled “at a very young age.”

“It was a marketing tactic by the tobacco industry to get kids to think it was cool to smoke at a very young age, develop these lethal habits at a very young age,” says City Councilor Greg Mertzig. “To a lesser extent, these toys in their Happy Meals kind of do the same thing. They reward kids and get them to think that it’s the okay thing to do at a very young age.”

Mertzig, an Iraq and Afghanistan war vet, told Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) that he’s firing at will upon fast food restaurants that, he says, are making America’s future soldiers too fat to fight. And, he claims his constituents support his efforts to determine how and what parents feed their own children:

“They don’t meet the physical requirements to join the military so there was an argument that it was actually a national security issue. And so through the dialogue with my constituents we decided and I decided that day that we needed to do something.”

Mertzig’s proposed ordinance would “ban free toys in meals with more than 600 calories, 10% fat and can’t have any trans fat. It could also require fruits or vegetables and whole grain foods,” reports WPR’s Mike Simonson.

The Happy Meal toy ban will be offered to the city council on Dec. 7. If Mertzig musters enough support, it will be voted on by the the council members at a later date.

Overlawyered.com’s Walter Olsen hits another one out of the ballpark today with his commentary in The Washington Times spotlighting the “growing aggressiveness of ‘public health’ officialdom in pushing scare campaigns about everyday consumption risks:”

The Puritans held that reminders of mortality had an edifying effect on the living, which is why they sometimes would illustrate even literature for young children with drawings of death’s-heads and skeletons. Something of the same spirit seems to animate our ever-advancing movement for mandatory public health. The Food and Drug Administration has just floated the idea of requiring cigarette packs to carry rotating pictures that would include corpses – yes, actual corpses – as well as close-ups of grotesque medical disorders that can afflict smokers.

New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s superactivist Health Department has begun public ad campaigns about the health risks of everyday foods, including a controversial YouTube video portraying soda drinkers as pouring globs of shimmery yellow fat into their open mouths and – just out – an ad showing an innocent-looking can of chicken-with-rice soup as bursting with dangerous salt. Whether or not you live in New York, you’re likely to be seeing more of this sort of thing because the mayor’s crew tends to set the pace for activist public-health efforts nationwide; the Obama administration, for example, picked Bloomberg lieutenant Thomas R. Frieden to head the influential Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Why should government use our own tax dollars to propagandize and hector us about the risks of salted snacks, chocolate milk or the other temptations of today’s supermarket aisle? The Bloomberg-Obama camp seems to feel that government dietary advice is superior to other sources of information we might draw on because (1) it’s more objective, independent and pure of motive and (2) it can draw on better science …